Seagate: Encrypting the Entire Hard Disk

We all want and need secure data, but how to achieve this goal is fraught with options. Seagate, a leading hard disk maker has a solution – to encrypt the entire hard disk. If your operating system crashes or your current security program fails, having data encrypted at the hard disk level will ensure your data is still secure.
USA Today writes – The world’s largest hard drive maker says its DriveTrust Technology, to be announced Monday, automatically encrypts every bit of data stored on the hard drive and requires users to have a key, or password, before being able to access the disk drive.
Seagates press release reads – DriveTrust Technology delivers new levels of simplicity, transparency and cost- effectiveness for securing digital information. The Seagate security platform automatically protects all drive data, not just selected partitions or files, at all times, and its security functions operate independently of the hard drive, preserving the hard drive’s full performance. DriveTrust Technology also offers these benefits:
– With DriveTrust Technology, secure hard drives are as easy to install and operate as standard drives. The security capabilities run transparently within the drive with no need for additional configuration. Set up can be as simple as creating a password for user authentication.
– Drive-level security requires no patches, updates or upgrades, eliminating many of the costs associated with traditional software solutions. DriveTrust Technology hard drives free IT organizations from having to distribute software updates or manage software versions, ensuring consistent and reliable security for data at rest.
– Information stored on DriveTrust Technology drives can be instantly erased, making it easy to re-deploy and retire the drives and reducing the time and costs traditionally associated with overwriting and erasing disc data.
– DriveTrust Technology gives independent software vendors (ISVs) a platform for building stronger security applications. The DriveTrust Technology software developer kit (SDK) includes the documentation and tools necessary to build DriveTrust Technology-enabled applications such as access controls needed to manage encryption keys, passwords and other forms of authentication for large deployments.
Seagate DriveTrust – Securing Digital Content Across All Storage Devices Seagate is committed to an open, standards-based architecture that will enable the implementation of DriveTrust Technology across all storage devices. Toward that end, an independent laboratory is certifying DriveTrust algorithms including encryption (AES and TripleDES), public key (RSA), and authentication (SHA-1).